uDevGames 2009 Discussion

FreakSoftware Wrote:Generally, my only beef with judges is that I feel no one is really better qualified to judge than anyone else, when everything is so subjective. If there were enough of them... like, at least fifteen of them... then maybe I could be convinced, but just 5 or so isn't nearly enough, and finding a big number of unbiased "experts" or "industry people" for a small contest isn't going to be easy. And then you're asking a whole of those people to try *every* single game (if there 30+ like there were in past contests).

I see your concern, but considering the number of sponsors willing to give to the contest, it seems like finding judges could be an attainable goal. Maybe we were just super blessed with the caliber of prizes this year, but $20,000 worth of goods for grabs makes it seem less like a small contest than it otherwise would.
As a disclaimer, I have never organized anything like this so I really don't know how hard getting judges might be. I guess I've been talking more from ideals than practical knowledge.

Well you can't measure the size of the contest by the dollar amount. I'd measure it by the number of games, attention, and number votes. All of which were much smaller this year than in past years. And also, $10,000 of the prize pool is for just three prizes which are irrelevant and arguably useless.

AnotherJake Wrote:You must've missed the part where I said it is already finished.

So according to what you're saying, the rules would indeed disqualify me from entering. That's exactly why I think the rule is exclusionary. I don't *want* to do anymore work on it. I already did the work on it. Nobody (except Gatti and kodex) have seen it. I just think it'd be kinda cool to enter it, but I can't because of the way the rules are structured.

TBH, I ignored the part where you said it is already finished, as that didn't make sense to me

Why would you enter finished game in the contest? As others have said, one of the major benefits of the contest is the rush of motivation to *do more work*. If you have a finished game, well, sell it

I don't know why everybody is complaining about stress. The contest doesn't have to be stressful. If there hadn't been the ruckus with voting, it wouldn't have been, for me. Sure you can stress yourself and fret about not winning, but that is something you can control. There's deadlines everywhere in life, and I believe such a contest deadline is the least serious of them.

DoG Wrote:If you say you allow 3 month limited and time unlimited entries, you are essentially running two contests in parallel. Might of course be a good thing, as you should get a wider range of entries, but the time limited entries might just go unnoticed if there's a bunch of shiny, fully polished games in the other category.

I'm starting to like the idea of two separate categories. The issue of having the three year old games overshadowing the three month old games isn't that hard to solve - you just have to have the deadlines and judging at different times.
This does mean that everything (judging, prize distribution etc) has to be done twice a year, but also has the advantage of keeping the profile of the competition up. This year there hasn't been a great deal of PR anyway, but if there are more announcements in 6 months time those will still mean more to people than if they don't hear anything until next February. It is much easier to build that profile back up if there are regular announcements to be made throughout the year.
That would mean AnotherJake could enter his game and Bill's zombie hordes could return, but those who would like to repeat the three month frenzy still have that option and everyone's a winner (although only the top three get a prize). If the deadlines are staggered the right way round it could also mean that developers who enter the three month category cold potentially continue working on their game and go for the long-haul category too. On the other hand, maybe we don't want JustinFic to be able to run away with all the prizes for both categories in a single year.
Ultimately it all comes down to how much Carlos wants to do or to delegate of course, but it is something to chew on. :chewing:

DoG Wrote:I don't know why everybody is complaining about stress. The contest doesn't have to be stressful. If there hadn't been the ruckus with voting, it wouldn't have been, for me.

Indeed. Working on Reclaimed was the time of my life! I really wasn't stressed out much by the contest. I had pretty low expectations in the contest itself, and I wasn't really very concerned about prizes and such. I just wanted to get my game fun.

I just lurk around these days - haven't developed in a few years. But I still read the boards a couple times a month (mostly to see TomorrowXPlus' new screenshots) to see what people are up to. Obviously UDG is something I'm very interested in.

Not to sidetrack the seemingly vibrant debate that's going on in this thread, but a suggestion from a "user" perspective:

1) It would be great if the Dev journals were actual journals - blog-style. I didn't follow along with any of them mostly because of the awkward interface - a journal shoved into a forum.

2) How about a torrent for a bundle of all of the entries? I wanted to try all of them and going through and clicking every link was a little tiresome for all of the entries.

3) I read almost no mentions of UDG in mainstream Mac sites this year. Seems a shame - prizes seem similar to contests prior, pretty much everything seems the same as the last few contests except the publicity.

Well done to all the contestants. I live in rural Kenya now teaching music, so what goes on my little hard drive really counts. Constellation is the only one that still lives on in my applications folder (still trying to figure out the perfect strategy - sort of a cross between risk and tic-tac-toe). Kudos to all the developers for some impressive entries.

Thanks blobbo! I'm glad you enjoyed Constellation. Can I assume by your name that you are the author of a certain sokobanesq puzzle game with a yellow blob as a protagonist? I have fond memories of figuring out that game!